The Volunteer
A Novel
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The Volunteer
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Ballerini
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Written by:
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Salvatore Scibona
About this listen
"Thrilling… Scibona has built a masterpiece." (The New York Times Book Review)
"All of it - all of it - is just so ridiculously beautiful." (Jason Sheehan, NPR.org)
"The rewards are enormous. This is a spectacular work of fiction." (San Francisco Chronicle)
A long-awaited new novel from a National Book Award Finalist, the epic story of a restless young man who is captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the United States government.
A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer.
But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.
With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling.
©2019 Salvatore Scibona (P)2019 Penguin AudioWhat the critics say
“Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Scibona’s lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice.... Scibona’s greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership.” (Booklist)
“One of the most thrilling things about The Volunteer is a refusal not just of this novelistic trend of smallness, but also of our own craven, personal brand-driven cultural moment. This novel’s question is not how a person might become himself through finding', but how he might lose everything, and, through losing, gain an honest apprehension of the world...Scibona is a savage coiner of similes, one who’ll cut sublimity with bathos to snatch a reader’s breath away: 'In the night, he went out to piss, and the stars were like a kitchen mess across a dark floor.' There are also roving, lyrical long shots of Queens streets that, in their grit and dazzle, recall the boyhood Bronx of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Like DeLillo in that book, Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. His lens zooms in and out of streets, rooms, consciousnesses. It becomes kaleidoscopic during those moments in which, with sickening inexorability, a life can go wrong...Scibona has built a masterpiece." (New York Times Book Review)